Affiliate programs. If you have no idea what affiliate programs are and how they can help you make money online from your website or blog, then read on. If you do know what they are then read on anyway, you might pick up something new.
There’s a massive list of affiliate programs available on the web right now, some good, other’s not so good and a few absolutely worthless ones. No matter what your website or blog is about you will surely find one or two affiliate marketing programs to suit your fancy.
What is an affiliate program?
Basically it is a money reward system. You sign up with an affiliate program via an online form (usually for free) and providing they accept your site you will then be given access to their programs promotional banners and links. Have a look in the sidebar of my site here. Under the heading Top Moneymakers are some button banner ads that I am using to make money with this site.
Scroll down slightly, see the Selected Links? These are affiliate text links that I have implemented. By the way it is very important to experiment with both the image banner links and text links to get a feel for what performs well on your site and I will get into more detail on that topic in a future post.
How the money’s earned
The amount of commission money you earn for having these affiliate links on your site will depend on the type of program you signed up for. Normally you will be rewarded by one or a few of the following methods:
CPM = Cost-Per-Impression (You get rewarded for a certain amount of page impressions for a specific ad)
CPC = Cost-Per-Click (You get rewarded each time a visitor clicks on an ad)
CPA or CPL = Cost-Per-Lead (You get rewarded for referring a lead through an ad)
CPS = Cost-Per-Sale (You get rewarded for referring a customer through an ad that leads to a sale)
An effective way of ensuring you make more money from your affiliate programs is to make sure the ads are targeted to the content of your own site topic. So if your site’s about car’s, you should display ads on car accessories or anything else car related. Remember, most of your visitors are checking out your site because they’re interested in the content, offer them “related” ads and they’re more likely to click on them. It is my belief that if a site is good enough then they’ll always return at a future date to see what’s new so there’s no need to be concerned about them disappearing for good.
If you are just starting out in the world of monetizing your website then I strongly recommend starting with the google adsense program. The reason I say this is because it’s relatively easy to sign up and implement and the ads that get displayed will automatically be related to your site content. Just make sure you have a read of their Terms and Conditions which explain all the rules about not clicking your own ads etc.
Affiliate program principles generally work very well on websites and blogs and with a little patience, constant tweaking and experimenting you can be well on your way to earning money online with affiliate advertising programs.
Here are a few programs that you can sign up for and have running on your own site pretty darn quickly!
Google Adsense
Affiliate Window
TrafficSynergy